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Musings

One of the most common beliefs is that the EU is imposing its law upon the United Kingdom, reducing the latter to a shadow of its former self: whereas once it was a Great Imperial Power, now it is merely a snivelling wreck, like all other nations. Leaving aside the also-unsavoury belief that a return to imperial Britain would be in any way a good thing (after enjoying, briefly, numerous members of the world’s former-largest colonial power hand-wringing about having to follow some trade legislation) it seems worth examining the notion that the EU is a threat to Britain as a sovereign state.

I’ve oscillated a lot over the past three months. I began tentatively voting Remain, before moving towards Leave after the Spectator debate, in which the Remain panel (Chuka Umunna, Liz Kendall, and Nick Clegg) performed very poorly. Inclinations to vote Leave were briefly strengthened by reading Daniel Hannan’s Why Vote Leave?, which at first read seemed to present a compelling case for Brexit.

In the end, having been lucky enough that people have pointed me to points at which Hannan misrepresents figures and consequent arguments, having considered some of his arguments (‘EU bureaucrats get too much free stuff!’, an unconvincing argument when one recalls the extent to which our own MPs manipulated their expenses) to be compelling rhetoric but lacking in substance, and having watched Nigel Farage of the UKIPS girn, gormlessly as ever, in front of a poster that bears unnerving similarities to Nazi propaganda, I’ve finally come down firmly, though reluctantly, in the Remain camp.